The Colorado Department of Revenue implemented RightNow Technologies to provide taxpayers with self-service access to tax information online in order to reduce call volumes and improve customer service. This resulted in an ROI of 8,732% and payback period of just 3 days. Key benefits included avoiding costs of hiring additional staff for the call center during peak tax season, and providing more rapid, accurate and consistent responses to taxpayers' questions. Continuous refinement of the knowledge base based on analytics of taxpayer interactions further optimized the system.

1. June 2008 Document I72
ROI CASE STUDY
RIGHTNOW TECHNOLOGIES
COLORADO DEPARTMENT OF REVENUE
THE BOTTOM LINE
The Colorado Department of Revenue (DOR) used RightNow Technologies
to provide self-service research to taxpayers, reduce call center and e-mail
volumes, and improve the accuracy and consistency of information
provided to the public.
ROI: 8,732%
Payback: 3 days
THE COMPANY
The Colorado Department of Revenue (DOR) is responsible for the collection of tax
revenues for the state of Colorado and during its peak season from early February
to mid April provides tax filing assistance to more than 2.4 million individual
income tax filers, 221,000 sales tax accountants, and 169,000 wage-withholding
organizations. During the income tax filing season — and for several months
following it — all of these individuals have questions regarding the proper
application of tax rules, the obtaining of forms, and the status of returns.
THE CHALLENGE
During the income tax filing season, it is difficult for the Colorado DOR to
adequately and cost effectively handle the spike in inquiries from the taxpayer base
it serves. Although call volumes can spike from approximately 3,000 calls per
week to more than 7,700 calls per week during tax season, the organization is able
to hire fewer than a dozen additional tax experts to handle calls and e-mails.
Because tax law is subtle and complex it is difficult to recruit, train, and retain
people with the breadth of expertise necessary to handle potentially arcane and
complex questions that people may ask. Worsening conditions for the call center
was the fact that taxpayers often repeatedly call or e-mail the DOR with the same
question until they get the answer they like. Because the Colorado DOR needs its
best tax experts to work on more important issues, such as the formulation of tax
policy, the organization has few highly informed employees available for staffing its
call center and replying to e-mails.
THE STRATEGY
In 2000, the Colorado DOR began looking for ways to reduce the volume of calls to
its call center, and to provide answers to the public in a rapid, precise, correct, and
consistent manner. A large portion of the public’s questions tends to be similar and
readily answered and a smaller portion tends to be more complex, requiring the
help of tax-trained subject matter experts. The Colorado DOR wanted to make
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2. June 2008 Document I72
self-service tax research available for questions that are easily answered, so that it
TOPICS could reduce the volume of calls to its call centers and make its highly trained tax
IT / Infrastructure available for the more difficult and complex questions.
Operations
Government In mid 2000, the Colorado DOR began using RightNow to create a knowledge base
Customer Relationship that the public could use to answer questions on its own, rather than call the
Management
organization’s call center. First, the organization assembled all of its content,
E-Commerce
scrubbed it for accuracy, and then formatted it for consumption by the public over
Software as a Service
the Web. Then it built a portal and designed interfaces that would enable people to
rapidly find the information they needed for the most commonly asked questions.
Automated e-mail responses were also created for the most often asked questions.
Lastly, the knowledge base was divided into two portions, a public version that
appears on the Web site, and a private version that is available only to employees.
RightNow is used on a continuous basis to capture knowledge anywhere in the
Colorado DOR and apply it to taxpayer interactions, regardless of how that person
contacts the organization.
Using RightNow to divert public inquiries from its call center and e-mail to its
publicly available knowledge base has resulted in annual Web site hit volumes of
more than one million. As a result, there have been dramatic reductions to the
volumes of e-mail and phone-based inquiries. RightNow is also used to monitor
how the public is using the knowledge base, enabling the organization to fine tune
the publicly available portion of the knowledge base and how it is used by the
public.
KEY BENEFIT AREAS
Using RightNow Technologies to access its institutional knowledge base and make it
available to the tax-paying public has enabled the Colorado DOR to reduce staffing
needs, improve customer service, and increase the accuracy and consistency of
information provided to taxpayers.
BENEFITS
TOTAL: $266,285
Key benefits from the solution include reduced call center costs. By using the
knowledge base to divert inquiries away from the call center and e-mail, the
Colorado DOR avoided spending additional money on temporary workers and
reassigning its staff and tax-trained subject matter experts to the call center during
the tax season.
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3. June 2008 Document I72
Using RightNow to make a knowledge base available to the public has also had
broader business benefits that are valuable to a service-driven organization, but
are not readily quantified. As the result of both Web-based delivery of to
commonly asked questions and automated e-mails, the Colorado DOR now
provides answers to the public in a far more rapid and consistent manner. These
techniques have also improved customer service levels and made it easier for
taxpayers to complete the tax preparation process. Additionally, using RightNow to
analyze its Web-based interactions with the public has enabled the Colorado DOR
to better understand the questions and concerns of the public, which has led to
increased customer service levels.
KEY COST AREAS
Key cost areas for the deployment were software, and personnel. One employee of
the Colorado DOR spent two days building the knowledge base and creating the
Web pages for access by the public. Another employee spends 40 percent of her
time researching new content for the knowledge base, publishing content, and
maintaining the system.
COSTS
TOTAL: $118,840
LESSONS LEARNED
Continuous fine tuning of both the knowledge base and how the public interacts
with it has been key to the success of the deployment. Initially, the Colorado DOR
was aggressive in publishing as much content to the knowledge base as possible.
However, this frequently resulted in a member of the public receiving too many
potential answers to a question, becoming frustrated, and then turning to either
the phone or e-mail for resolution. After using RightNow to discover that these
users were sometimes overwhelmed, the organization reduced the public portion of
its knowledge base — RightNow enables creation of separate knowledge bases for
people inside and outside of the organization — by 75 percent. This made it easier
for people to find the information they needed, and increased the self-service rate.
Since the deployment, the Colorado DOR has continually monitored public
interaction with the knowledge base — the questions they ask, the content that is
most useful, and how these change at different points in the tax season. This has
enabled the organization to fine tune what information the public sees, which
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4. June 2008 Document I72
questions are featured at the home page as the 20 most often-asked questions,
and the allocation of content between the private and public portions of the
knowledge base.
CALCULATING THE ROI
Nucleus calculated the costs of software and personnel over a 3-year period to
quantify Colorado DOR’s total investment in RightNow.
Direct benefits calculated consisted of avoided new hires for the call center. This
savings was quantified based on the assumption that a small percentage of Web
site page views would have translated into calls to the call center if the knowledge
base was not available. The calculation was made using the average time of a call
today and the average annual fully loaded cost of a call center employee.
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5. DETAILED FINANCIAL ANALYSIS
COLORADO DEPARTMENT OF REVENUE
SUMMARY
Project: RightNow Technologies
Annual return on investment (ROI) 8732%
Payback period (years) 0.01
Net present value (NPV) 56,041
Average yearly cost of ownership 39,613
ANNUAL BENEFITS Pre-start Year 1 Year 2 Year 3
Direct 0 88,762 88,762 88,762
Indirect 0 0 0 0
Total Benefits Per Period 0 88,762 88,762 88,762
DEPRECIATED ASSETS Pre-start Year 1 Year 2 Year 3
Software 0 0 0 0
Hardware 0 0 0 0
Total Per Period 0 0 0 0
DEPRECIATION SCHEDULE Pre-start Year 1 Year 2 Year 3
Software 0 0 0 0
Hardware 0 0 0 0
Total Per Period 0 0 0 0
EXPENSED COSTS Pre-start Year 1 Year 2 Year 3
Software 0 11,750 11,750 11,750
Hardware 0 0 0 0
Consulting 0 0 0 0
Personnel 565 27,675 27,675 27,675
Training 0 0 0 0
Other 0 0 0 0
Total Per Period 565 39,425 39,425 39,425
FINANCIAL ANALYSIS Pre-start Year 1 Year 2 Year 3
Net cash flow before taxes (565) 49,337 49,337 49,337
Net cash flow after taxes (283) 24,668 24,668 24,668
Annual ROI - direct and indirect benefits 8732% 8732% 8732%
Annual ROI - direct benefits only 8732% 8732% 8732%
Net present value (NPV) (283) 21,168 39,821 56,041
Payback (years) 0.01
Average annual cost of ownership 565 39,990 39,708 39,613
3-year IRR 8732% 8732%
FINANCIAL ASSUMPTIONS
All government taxes 50%
Discount rate 15%
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